The Bundeswehr has to feel defeated a second time. First there was the fleeing retreat in early summer, now the Taliban are conquering Kunduz, a city through which German armored personnel carriers patrolled not so long ago. Once again it becomes plausible why government politicians such as Defense Minister Kramp-Karrenbauer or Foreign Minister Maas kept their distance when the last 264 Bundeswehr members from the Hindu Kush landed in Wunstorf near Hanover on June 30th. Keeping your distance promised to sit out how precarious and embarrassing the Afghanistan adventure ends for Germany and the West as a whole.
First German security and well-being were presumably defended in the Hindu Kush, today Afghanistan is far enough away to allow itself to be overly bothered by the causality – own withdrawal – advance of others. Norbert Röttgen (CDU), however, wants to continue fighting as quickly as possible. Not he himself, of course, but rather the Americans should direct it, primarily through air strikes on the Taliban’s advance routes. “I think you shouldn’t just watch it, you just have to oppose it,” says Röttgen in the DLF, who remains cloudy when it comes to the part that the Bundeswehr would have to take on in this case. Their leadership leaves no doubt: a withdrawal is a withdrawal, that was a resignation with no return.
Nearsighted or blind
What concerns torchbearers of perseverance like Röttgen is probably the sustained delegitimization of the western alliance, which had chosen Afghanistan as the reference project of a “war on terror”. It now ends with “mujahideen” or “terrorists” showing off as unhindered as it seems. But who could seriously be so short-sighted or blind and believe that the Afghan resistance would not take advantage of the vacuum left by the US?
The Taliban want to rule the country because it is – not alone, but also – their country. They want to govern and serve their agenda. It remains to be seen whether this will result in a caliphate, as between 1996 and 2001. As I said: at the moment they are not “conquering” anything, it is their country in which they are fighting. It is primarily populated by the Pashtun people, who have always been the ethnic backbone of uprisings and rebels. This was already the case in the 19th century, when British expeditionary forces coming from India tried to gain a foothold in the Hindu Kush and threatened to break.
Vietnam of the Soviets
When a jihadist guerrilla rose up against the Soviet occupation at the end of the 1980s and wanted to control their own country, Western observers found this absolutely legitimate. The USA under President Ronald Reagan equipped these associations with modern weapons, whether it was the truly radical Islamic Hezb-i-Islami party of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar or the Taliban, which was only just being established at the time. The decisive factor was that these predominantly Islamist rebels inflicted heavy losses on the Soviet army, so that their withdrawal became inevitable with almost 13,500 dead in February 1989. The associated loss of international prestige, not least in the own camp, was enormous and helped Gorbachev to dismantle the Eastern Bloc.
At the moment the progress of the Taliban can hardly be stopped because a retreating, not necessarily strong, rather unwilling National Army (ANA) can or will do little to counter it. Another meta-narrative about the western presence in Afghanistan, which has always been willingly circulated in this country, has shrunk to a legend. Weren’t these armed forces trained for decades by the German armed forces and equipped with NATO equipment? Didn’t they have the best prerequisites to stock up on combat strength?
Once 200,000 NATO soldiers
And from January 2015 the (ISAF) successor mission “Resolute Support” was not officially dedicated to the goal of advising, training and leading the Afghan military. Who thought of such a disastrous result as is now being revealed? After all, there was always talk of 350,000 Afghan soldiers, police officers and security services being kept under arms, including paid for with foreign aid, not to mention permanent logistical support from NATO. If these formations are clearly inferior to the Taliban, which has never had more than 60,000 combatants, this would increase the military defeat of the West, the USA and NATO.
Between 2010 and 2014, not least because of President Obama’s troop increases, a good 200,000 NATO soldiers were in this theater of war. Should this have strengthened rather than weakened the Taliban, there can only be one explanation for it: They benefit from the support or at least the approval of the population, at least in rural areas. If so, the country should not be lost lightly, but rather the right to self-determination should apply even if it asserts itself under the current circumstances.
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